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The news stories this week about Munro reported that she is the second Canadian to win the prize in literature, after Saul Bellow. This is irritating, though strictly speaking correct. Bellow was born in Lachine, Que., and moved with his family to Chicago when he was 9.

Case closed: Bellow was an American. Munro is Canadian.

Her geography is ours. Open any of her books and you will find a story set on the Queen St. streetcar, or Kitsilano Beach, or on the Bay of Fundy. One of her characters is watching TV, riveted by news of a terrible fire in Toronto, the burning buildings once home to hippies, “with their tarot cards and beads and paper flowers the size of pumpkins.” In another, you’ll find a mention of Pierre Berton.

Hers are haunting stories, seared on to our hearts — a woman drives from Ottawa to live with her father; a small-town doctor who is the local abortionist; a son shows such promise — he’ll be a scientist! — then vanishes; young marriages are wrecked at drunken parties in Point Grey.

Mostly, they are set in Munro’s Presbyterian Ontario towns, where Maclean’s and Chatelaine and Saturday Night await patients in the doctor’s waiting room. Her characters attend the United Church; they shop at Canadian Tire.

These are the towns we know, the ones we pass through on holiday with a roof rack full of camping gear on our way to other Ontario towns.

Her own story is set not only in Wingham, Ont., where she was born, and Clinton, Ont., where she later lived, but in Victoria, B.C., where her then husband, Jim Munro, opened a bookstore. She often worked in Munro’s, which many still regard as the finest book store in Canada.

Munro’s books were the ones many of us took when we travelled abroad. A link to home.

Waiting in a train station in Xian, China, I was reading The Moons of Jupiter and was stunned when a character, Dennis, started talking about Xian. It seemed even more of a connection to Munro. She said in a CBC radio interview that she often received letters from her readers saying, “This is me” or “This is my reality.”

Not long after I returned to Canada, I saw Munro sitting by herself at a Toronto author’s festival. I rushed to tell her my tale of serendipity in Xian, believing it might delight her. It was a grave mistake. I don’t think our eyes met. She seemed embarrassed. Actually, she seemed to recoil.

Alice Munro has now won the most coveted literary prize of all, joining Doris Lessing, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and J.M. Coetzee.

She is 82 and has spent her life writing — 14 original short story collections in all. She surely is a lesson in sticking to it.

At 18, while still at university, Munro started getting her stories published. She figured it would be “clear sailing” after that, she told CBC radio, that she’d see her work published every few months. With three children, of course, it didn’t happen so smoothly — more like every three or four years.

William Shawn, the fabled editor of The New Yorker, hesitated to publish Munro in the early years, finding her work a little “rough” — apparently a reference to vulgarity in her language, as the New York Times noted last year.

But she loved the magazine because it wouldn’t refuse stories on grounds of length — though even into the 1990s, she told Peter Gzowski, The New Yorker would sometimes turn her down.

Turn her down? It seems unreasonable. Any writer, aspiring or established, would do well to study the deceptive simplicity of her style. She has said that she rewrites and rewrites and then, most critically, “eliminates.” If anything seems to be “decoration,” she slices it out.

Her ideal, she has said, is to write “something so clear, as if looking through perfectly clean water, so words don’t get between the reader and what’s happening.”

For this shining clarity, for stories set in the landscape we know, for her profound understanding of the secret ways of the heart, we rejoice in Alice Munro, Canada’s Nobel laureate.

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